Part Of Loving America Is Making It Better

Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani out of line on Obama, Frank Harris writes

Frankly, I don't think anyone in America should question a black person about his or her love of country. So it angered me to hear Rudy Giuliani do just that in asserting that President Barack Obama does not love America. It angered me to hear him proclaim that Obama's pointing out America's faults is indicative of not loving America.

It angered me because it fed into the continuing questions about blacks being Americans and the need to prove ourselves as Americans. It angered me because it suggests an unreasonable, illogical expectation that blacks should love America with no questions asked.

Consider these American history moments:

1619: After surviving the long Middle Passage in the dark bowels of a ship and watching the dead get tossed into the sea, the first Africans arrive in America as slaves.

Early 1800s: The color of so many descendants of Africans in America is no longer black because of the rape of black women. They get a new name: colored or mulatto, to distinguish them from the darker Negroes.

1865: The Civil War ends. Forty acres and a mule are nowhere to be seen. Reconstruction is deconstructed. Men in white sheets commence a reign of terror in the South as the North looks the other way. Blacks are disenfranchised and slaughtered.

1896: Plessy v. Ferguson makes society separate and unequal. It's legal to discriminate in all facets of American life.

1918: Blacks answer the call and fight for this country to save democracy. Many die for this country with the living returning to be lynched or denied the freedom at home that they fought for abroad. It's the same in World War II, Korea, Vietnam.

1882 to 1964: A total of 3,445 blacks were known to be lynched throughout the land, according to Tuskegee Institute archives.

This is a glimpse of part of our nation's history. It is the past, yes, but we still have great disparities in wealth, health, education, incarceration, police shootings and beatings today.

Given this past and present reality, it would make sense that blacks would have reservations about unabashedly loving their country. The fact that, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center poll, 60 percent of blacks considered themselves as patriotic as everyone else, while 26 percent considered themselves more patriotic is remarkable.

But at what point would there be a reasonable and logical expectation that blacks should love their country without question?

In 2008, when Obama became president?

Even with this milestone, Obama is subject to the type of relentless and unprecedented attacks that arguably no other president has had to endure.

There are people in America, who, like Rush Limbaugh a few years back, have hoped Obama fails in his job, even at the expense of the nation they profess to love so much more. The question is not whether Obama loves his country, but whether people like Giuliani and Limbaugh love this country more than they dislike Obama — and people who are like Obama.

As one of those people, I profess my love of the idea of what America is supposed to be — not necessarily the reality of what it was and is, and certainly not to the point where it goes unquestioned.

There are still too many bastions of racial animus and disparity in America that must be questioned and challenged. Yes, America is my country, my home. There is no place now that I would rather be. But I should be as comfortable in America in my American skin as other Americans are in theirs.

I am not.

So I speak. So I write. So I say: No fellow Americans should question black Americans about our love for America until they can answer to the affirmative that they love black people as much as they love themselves. Love our best and our worse, as much as you love your best and your worse.

So I say: To point out America's faults is not wrong. To point out things that need to be done to improve, to make America better, is the greatest service to this nation and its people.